Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  I guess my question really relates and attempts to address the question for potential subjective analysis through what is written, versus how it is written.

  By example, in your analysis, is the "high intelligence" revealed through his manner of writing or through what is written? Such as the known sample that reads "portrait of a chap suddenly aware of the words of Sigmund Freud." I would not expect that sentence to be written by a plumber in Sedro Woolley, although one never really knows!

  Guess my real question is: Is the source of this analysis strictly coming from the actual mechanics of the writer as opposed to any extraneous outside knowledge or information that might be gleaned from the wording and text of the sample?

  Regards,

  Steve Hodel

  Hodel Investigations

  To which she responded:

  To: Steve Hodel

  From: Hannah McFarland

  Date: May 6, 2000

  Dear Steve:

  Following is my response to your questions.

  You want to know if these analyses (personality assessments) are readily "accepted" in the main. That is a thorny question. If you talk with academic psychologists, they will tend to be skeptical of handwriting analysis. Even though handwriting analysis was developed in the psychology departments at universities in Europe and the U.S., few psychologists are aware of this. Also, most psychologists know nothing about handwriting analysis, so are thus speaking out of ignorance, when they criticize it.

  The general public has an entirely different view of handwriting analysis. Many people are quite receptive to it, and many people are very interested in it. High profile cases (such as the Jon Benet Ramsey case) involving handwriting have been in the news lately, which has brought much more exposure and awareness about handwriting.

  Even though personality assessment via handwriting (HW) also known as graphology is a different discipline from questioned document examination (determining authorship) the public does not differentiate between the two. So, even though the Ramsey case is primarily about who wrote the "ransom" letter, it has also stimulated considerable interest in graphology (personality assessment).

  6,000 U.S. businesses are using graphology as part of the hiring process, according to Inc. magazine. In spite of the lack of conventional psychology's blessing, corporate America has found it to be accurate.

  One reason why graphology has yet to achieve mainstream acceptance, is that there is not a standard licensing available. Anyone can claim to be an "expert" graphologist. Thus there are plenty of amateur types promoting themselves as professional. Their work is inferior as a result and does not improve the reputation of graphology.

  I hope the above makes sense to you, Steve. It's a complicated topic! Your next question was about the source of the analysis. My report was based on the HW only. Knowing that the printer had committed murder, I could have been inclined to write that he was prone to violence. I did not see a lot of signs of propensity toward violence in the printing, so did not report that. The intelligence is seen in the printing, not the content of what is written.

  If you desire, I could also write an explanation of how I arrived at the personality assessment conclusions.

  Sincerely,

  Hannah McFarland

  Ms. McFarland noted an extremely unusual characteristic in the suspect's writing that, to my mind, demonstrates a bridge connecting the psychological orientation of graphology to what I consider the more empirical science of questioned-document analysis.

  Graphological analysis falls within the area of psychological profiling, which has tremendous potential value in possible screening and detection to be used as an investigative tool. However, due to the subjective and highly complex nature of the human mind, its evidentiary value must be viewed with healthy skepticism. In this case, knowing what we do about the writer, we find that the expert was highly accurate in her personality assessment/analysis.

  This bridge between these two branches of handwriting analysis specifically relates to the "Chinese Chicken" sample, K-5, and the printing Father wrote on the drawing in 1949.

  In the sample below, I have enlarged my name, "STEVEN." During her character analysis of the known writing, Ms. McFarland noted a handwriting phenomenon so exceptionally rare that in her examination of documents over many years she had never come across it. This rarity related to the manner in which the three letters "TEV" in "STEVEN" were written.

  As Ms. McFarland explained:

  It appears that all three letters were highly connected. The T bar connects directly to the top of the E. Most people lift the pen at this point to complete the E. But instead, this printer keeps going in order to form the V, and then goes back to complete the E.

  She advised me that to find two connected letters was not particularly rare, but three connected was unheard of, and would indicate the type of exceptionally high intelligence and forethought that might be found in a master chess champion such as a Boris Spassky or a Bobby Fischer. Confirmation of her observation was possible because I possessed the original drawing and was therefore able to verify the three unbroken letters. Thus, in this particular instance, because we were able to view the original document, her analysis of the three connected letters was "positive" instead of highly probable.

  Exhibit 51

  Above is the sample K-5, with an enlargement of the name "STEVEN" demonstrating the printed "TEV" connected and unbroken.

  Here, also, is one final sample (K-10), although it was not used as a submitted known sample to the expert. K-10 is copied from a portion of a contract document and was written and dated by George Hodel on January 11, 1999, just four months before his death. I include it because it demonstrates his consistency in the use of a specific characteristic. Within this limited sample of his printing, where he has printed only five sentences, we find he has written the open-bottomed letter "B" (circled) seven out of the eight times he used it.

  Exhibit 52

  K-10 (1999)

  This open "B" is only one of the four unique and individual characteristics of my father's handwriting that identify him as the author of the Black Dahlia Avenger and Jeanne French notes.

  Hannah McFarland's opinion was confirmed in large measure by two previous handwriting experts in their separate 1947 analyses. Like their modern-day counterpart, both of these earlier experts were a combination of graphologist and questioned-document examiner. Submitting a character analysis of the suspect, they concluded that an unspecified number of the postcards were handprinted by the same person.

  Clark Sellers, the internationally recognized handwriting expert who provided forensic testimony that resulted in the conviction and execution of Bruno Hauptmann for the murder of the Lindbergh baby, was requested to examine the Black Dahlia evidence. He told the police and public that, in his opinion, "It was evident the writer took great pains to disguise his or her personality by printing instead of writing the message and by endeavoring to appear illiterate." But, he added, "The style and formation of the printed letters betrayed the writer as an educated person."

  In examining the Black Dahlia documents, handwriting expert Henry Silver told the police, "The sender is an egomaniac and possibly a musician. The fluctuating base line of the writing reveals the writer to be affected by extreme fluctuations of mood, dropping to melancholy. The writer suffers from mental conflict growing out of resentment or hatred due to frustration of sex urge."

  George Hodel's profile includes all three of these characteristics: he was highly educated, a musician, and an egomaniac.

  Based on the accumulated evidence, there can be no farther doubt: my father was the sadistic psychopath who killed both Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French.

  However, it's also important to examine the "why" behind the crimes and to establish whether or not George Hodel, and in all likelihood his partner Fred Sexton, were responsible for the deaths of other lone women during the 1940s and '50s in and around Los Angeles. Was it possible that George Hodel had no
t only killed Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French but others as well? Had he, as I now began to fear, been a serial killer?

  23

  More 1940s L.A. Murdered

  Women Cases

  BECAUSE OF THE SENSATIONAL COVERAGE of the Black Dahlia murder in newspapers around the country in the late 1940s, most people who followed the case don't realize that Elizabeth Short's murder was only one of a series of crimes against lone attractive women from 1943 through the end of the decade. These cases bore striking similarities to one another, not only in the victims' profiles but in the nature and proximity of their crime scenes, the types of evidence that turned up, the descriptions of the men last seen with them, and the ways in which the police were taunted after the crimes.

  In researching many of these crimes, some of which have already been examined by earlier researchers and authors, I found that law enforcement agencies other than the LAPD, such as the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, the Long Beach police, and the San Diego police, had also considered the possibility that these crimes were, in the newspapers' words, "Dahlia-related." Because of LAPD's dogged resistance, and in some instances outright refusal, to share information with neighboring law enforcement, nothing came of the connections that to me seem readily apparent.

  During a grand jury investigation in 1949, later articles quoted several LAPD officers who testified that when they had attempted to pursue leads possibly connecting the Dahlia case to one in Long Beach, they were summarily removed from the active investigation and transferred to another division. Unless some commander ordered detectives to share information, the rule was, "It's our case," and little or no information was exchanged between agencies, nor was it even distributed to divisional detectives within the department. This LAPD exclusivity and informational lockdown was maintained for over five decades. As it relates to the Elizabeth Short investigation, nothing has changed from day one. That, I firmly believe, is why, despite what I consider some very compelling evidence, the killers of Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French, plus three additional women that I present below — Ora Murray, Georgette Bauerdorf, and Gladys Kern — and probably many more victims, were never caught. As we shall see, it was neither ignorance nor inefficiency that prevented these crimes from being solved, but rather a massive cover-up on the part of the LAPD.

  Following are three investigative summaries on victims Ora Murray, Georgette Bauerdorf, and Gladys Kern, the first two crimes occurring before Black Dahlia, the last roughly a year after.

  Ora Murray (July 27, 1943): The "White Gardenia" Murder

  Early on a Tuesday morning, July 27, 1943, the fifteen-year-old son of a golf course greenskeeper discovered the nude body of Ora Elizabeth Murray, age forty-two, lying on the ground near the parking lot of the Fox Hills golf course in West Los Angeles. The victim's dress had been wrapped around her body like a sarong, a white gardenia placed under her right shoulder. She had been severely beaten about her face and body. The wristwatch Ora Murray was wearing had been smashed and broken during the assault, probably as a result of her raising her arms to defend herself against the blows to her head as her assailant repeatedly struck her with a heavy blunt instrument. The destruction of her watch in all likelihood fixed the exact time of her murder, 1:50 a.m., consistent with an early-morning attack just six hours before the body was discovered. At the scene that morning, detectives picked up what was described by the newspapers as "a torn credit card from an oil company, containing a serial number," a potentially important piece of evidence that detectives said they would investigate.

  The autopsy performed on the victim revealed that the cause of death was due to "constriction of the larynx by strangulation" along with the contributory factors of "concussion of the brain and subdural hemorrhage." The body was found just outside the Los Angeles city limits, and therefore was in the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, whose homicide division handled the investigation.

  Sheriff's detectives quickly discovered that the victim, who was married to an Army sergeant stationed in Mississippi, had only arrived in Los Angeles the previous Thursday. Mrs. Murray had been visiting her sister, Latona Leinann, and her husband, Oswald, who lived in L.A. and who, at the time Ora Murray's body was discovered, were in the process of filing a missing persons report with the sheriff.

  Tracing Ora's movements the night before her murder provided homicide detectives with the following information from Latona:

  On Monday night, July 26, 1943, Ora and her sister decided to go dancing at the Zenda Ballroom, at 7th and Figueroa Avenue, in downtown Los Angeles (one block from Father's medical office at 7th and Flower). At the Zenda, Ora and Latona met two men whom the latter described as "Preston," an Army sergeant, and a civilian, "tall, thin, with black hair," named "Paul," whom she characterized as "very suave and a very good dancer." Latona said that Paul was wearing "a dark double-breasted suit and a dark fedora." She also remembered, "Paul told us that he lived in San Francisco and was just down visiting Los Angeles for a few days."

  The foursome danced for some time, then Paul offered to show the two women "around Hollywood and go dancing at the Palladium." At that point, Preston took off, leaving the two women with Paul.

  Latona reluctantly agreed to go along with her sister and Paul, but only on condition that they drive to her house to pick up her husband. Paul agreed, and drove the women in what Latona told detectives was "a flashy blue convertible coupe" to Latona's house. The Los Angeles Examiner quoted Latona as saying, "We went home to get Oswald, but he was sleepy and wouldn't go and finally my sister told the man she would go with him anyway." Latona said she saw her sister leave her residence with the handsome stranger and that was the last she saw of her until she identified the body for sheriff's detectives the following afternoon.

  The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department continued its search in an effort to identify Paul, whom they considered their prime suspect. By the following week they took a statement from a witness, thirty-one-year-old secretary Jeanette Walser, who said she had met someone who might be connected to the Murray murder investigation. The man called himself Grant Terry and told her he was a federal attorney from the East Coast. After what Jeanette Walser called a "whirlwind ten-day courtship," they became engaged and were to be married five days later. However, it turned out the man called "Terry" was a con man who bilked Walser out of $700 cash and her diamond ring before he vanished.

  The jilted witness told detectives that she had also loaned Grant Terry her blue convertible the day before the murder had occurred, and he had returned it to her the day following the murder. At that time, Terry had told his fiancee that "he had to go to San Diego with a man named George [my emphasis] to try a case that had unexpectedly come up, but would return in two days." Grant Terry never came back.

  Jeanette Walser also provided detectives with a photograph of Grant Terry, which ran in the Los Angeles Examiner on August 5, 1943, alongside the front-page story Walser had told police.

  Detectives showed Walser's photograph of "Grant Terry" to Latona, as well as to several other unnamed women who saw "Paul" with the victim the night of her murder. These witnesses, while not making a positive identification, said that the photograph strongly resembled "Paul," but that none of them could remember Paul's having glasses — in the Walser photograph he was wearing glasses.

  The case was submitted to the district attorney's office. Based on the circumstances and tentative identifications, Deputy District Attorney Edwin Myers issued a felony fugitive warrant charging "Grant Terry, age 34," with the murder of Ora Elizabeth Murray.

  In a related article in the Los Angeles Examiner three days later, headlined, "U.S. Joins Hunt for Gardenia Slayer Suspect," the newspaper reported that a U.S. federal warrant had also been issued by the FBI on August 7 charging separate felony counts and naming "Grant Terry" as a fugitive. The felony warrant, based on the information provided by Jeanette Walser, charged Grant Terry with "impersonating an attorney of the lands division
of the War Department, in which false capacity he allegedly obtained $700 from Miss Jeanette J. Walser, 8019 South Figueroa Street."

  At a coroner's inquest on August 5, Ora Murray's sister provided a hesitant but tentative identification of the photograph of "Grant Terry" provided by the witness Jeannette Walser, stating, "It could very easily be Paul, but I can't say positively." She told the inquest jurors that "while the photograph strongly resembled 'Paul,' that at no time during the evening, either at the dance hall or while driving the convertible did he wear glasses, as seen in the photograph."

  A Los Angeles Examiner story on August 6 reported that, even though a felony warrant had been issued for a suspect by the name of "Grant W. Terry," the coroner's inquest jury returned a verdict that the death of Ora Murray was "caused by person unidentified to the jury." The jury's ruling was based on the fact that they considered the sister's tentative identification insufficient to name Grant Terry as the murder suspect.

  The investigation remained dormant until the arrest of a man named Roger Lewis Gardner, aka "Grant Terry," on the fugitive warrant in New York in March 1944. Gardner was extradited to California, where, after Latona Leinann changed her tentative identification to a "positive," he was formally arraigned for the murder of Ora Murray.

  At Gardner's two-week jury murder trial in Los Angeles in October 1944, the defendant took the stand in his own defense and, while he admitted that he had "promised to marry Jeannette Walser and did commit the theft of her ring," adamantly denied knowing or ever seeing Ora Murray or her sister Latona. He stated he had never set foot in the Zenda Ballroom and denied any involvement whatsoever in the murder of Ora Murray.

  Gardner testified, and his alibi was confirmed by defense witnesses, that he had been with his "fiancee" Jeanette Walser until 8:15 P.M on the night of the murder, therefore making it physically impossible for him to be at the downtown dance hall at 8:30 P.M. Further testimony showed that on the night of the murder, just minutes before "Paul" was seen dancing with the victim, Gardner was twenty miles away wearing "sport clothes" rather than the dark suit and fedora known to be worn by "Paul."